12/18/2025
Cognitive neuroscientist Dan-Mikael Ellginsen from the University of Oslo in Norway led a 2016 review that highlighted three ways that we experience touch.
1. Gate of attention: This refers to where the focus of your body is. It’s basically your brain’s way of selecting specific stimulus to pay attention while filtering out others.
For example, clients might not realize they have a “sore spot” until you touch that area. Another more mundane example is when you’re sitting on your couch watching a movie, you probably aren’t aware of your seat pressing against your bottom or how your feet and legs are positioned unless you bring awareness to those body parts.
2. Prediction: This is where you anticipate what something feels like before you even touch it. One example in massage therapy is how some clients expect a massage would feel based on their prior experience.
If they find deep tissue massage alleviates their back pain, then it’s likely beneficial to them. The same could be said for those who find light touch massage, like Swedish, to be beneficial.
3. Context: Sensory inputs, such as visual and auditory cues from who is touching you, how you feel, and where your environment is. For example, being touched during a massage or physiotherapy session by a qualified therapist is quite different than having a random customer touch you at a coffee shop.
Sometimes C-tactile fibers do a “hedonic flip” where the same soothing touch can feel very threatening, or at best, uncomfortable. A common example is how sensitive the skin gets around an injured or inflamed area. Such clues support the idea that the change of C-tactile fiber function motivates you to protect the injured part.
“Given the strong contextual influences on touch pleasantness, it is unknown whether there are qualities of certain touch stimuli that inherently carry a positive hedonic value (i.e., are pleasant or give rise to positive affect), or whether the hedonic value of touch is always dependent on other contextual or internal factors,” Ellingsen et al. wrote.
Details: https://massagefitnessmag.com/massage/skin-sensory-receptors/
